Mechanical Death Wish Mixtape Track Breakdown
Some words about each of the tracks on the mixtape.
To those curious, and in the spirit of sharing creative ideas, I wrote some blurbs about each of the tracks appearing on the mixtape. It’s also part of a larger exercise to get back into writing on music, something I used to do a lot. I hope to make this site a place to share stuff that I find cool, post mixes, musings or whatever. It’s in the spirit of the mid 2000s, when people kept blogs. The name Avant-Lard is from my old blogpost, and is still online if you want to take a peek, although a lot of the youtube clips are no longer available. With this project Countach, I want to create something direct with my audience. I am really bummed out on the ways in which we connect online and through that offline nowadays, so this is trying to get back to something that feels direct. When I was in Ghösh, or even my previous bands, anytime someone would purchase something online such as a shirt or tape, I would send them a postcard. I really valued these connections and it really does mean the world when someone decides to support your art when essentially it is all free. Ok, before this post turns into something else let’s get to the tracks.
The Promise of Technology - This piece was heavily inspired by the soundtrack to Suspiria (original version) by Goblin, as well as John Carpenter‘s soundtracks to Halloween I and III, Assault On Precinct 13, and The Fog. It is pretty different than the other tracks on the album and when I made it I wasn’t sure where it would end up. I decided to have it lead off the record by taking a cue from Funkadelic’s ‘Maggot Brain’ and putting the most irregular track up front. The song and album title, along with the ominous sounding music, definitely point toward a pessimistic view of technology. However, I like to think of this record as a sort of play between the contrasting exciting and terrifying present and futures of technology. Borrowing inspiration from Kraftwerk, whose songs like ‘Radioactivity’, ‘Computer Love’, ‘Autobahn’ and ‘Pocket Calculator’ point to the fun and ease technology but also to its apocalyptic horizons and alienating effects
It’s Time - This began as a GHÖSH demo, thinking perhaps it could be an intro to an eventual album. With this and the previous track, it’s like this mixtape has two intros. It is essentially two beats, that had around the same BPM, smashed together. A thing about electronic music is the ability to just splice two different pieces of music together. This is a technique I used throughout the mixtape and in many other productions.
Second Screen Experience - A hypnagogic vapor wave inspired track. A hazy vibe and a little bit somber and lonely; scrolling your phone alone with Unsolved Mysteries on.
The Gazillionaire Sprint - I Wrote this beat with my buddy Danny Murillo at his home studio. Danny was my literal next door neighbor for a time. It took a few months before we both realized we made music. Danny worked on the last GHÖSh EP, mixing and mastering it, and is an incredibly talented producer and engineer. We just wanted to make a really heavy crazy beat. It started around the fuzzed out bass line created on the excellent free(!) synth plugin, the TAL-Noisemaker. I was looking around for vocalist and Bret stepped up and did an awesome job. He really finished the idea that me and Danny had come up with. Bret’s group, Lip Critic, is really fantastic and we’ve collaborated on a few things over the years.
Autonomic Beat - This song is centered on a heavily processed loop that I found on some random sample pack downloaded on Soulseek. For awhile I was looking on soulseek trying to find old sample CDs from the 90s to try and re-create those big beat, drum n bass, jungle tracks from back in the day, using the original sources that made those tracks happen. This is the only track that features my vocals, I’ll be it, very processed.
Drug Auction - Again, a big beat inspired track that was a GHÖSH demo. I really wanted vocals for this one, but didn’t have a vocalist lined up so I got the idea to put an auctioneer to it. I looked on YouTube and I found a couple videos of auctioneers and I chopped them up and, put it together. I found auctioneers speech to have a very musical quality to it. Comping together a couple different auctioneers, I made the “vocal”. The end features an interpolation of Apex Twin’s ‘Ageispolis’, played on a 303, with a recording from an old numbers station. Numbers stations are shortwave radio stations that just read out numbers, they have been known to be used in espionage. I thought splicing the sample of the numbers station voice reading out numbers and the auctioneer calling prices to be an interesting juxtaposition even if there is no direct relation or subversion.
Alien Fart - Yet another GHÖSH demo. An aggressive drum n bass track with a slinky baseline. I ran both the drum breaks and bass through the Meris Ottobit Jr. It is a unique pedal that has a bit crusher, lo pass filter and glitch/stutter/repeater effect that you can beat match with midi. Using the glitch effect you can chop beats or phrases on the fly. It’s really fun to just play around with it and see what kind of chops you come up with. Often I would just loop passages for a while and find the best parts and comp it together for the final take. The filter is super fun to sweep on its own. I ran a lot of the drums on the mixtape, as well as other instruments, through the Ottobit. I did this to help give all the tracks some cohesion, since they were all coming from different times of creation, I felt it helped glue the whole sound together and make the mixtape feel connected.
$9.99 Prime Rib - the main riff was written using a Kaoss pad. All the brakes are fed through a healthy amount of distortion. I can’t remember if I used an overdrive pedal on them or not. Sometimes I like to run drums through overdrive pedals to get a good distortion sound. You just need a little bit of distortion. Running drums through something like a metal zone is too much. The breaks are getting chopped up using the Ottobit Jr.
2 Door Rav 4 - I met Ethan through Danny a couple summers ago when he was his folks in Philadelphia, Ethan is based out of Ireland. Their project Julia Louise KnifeFist is awesome and their style felt like a great fit for this track. Ethan came over and Wrote all the lyrics and performed and recorded it in all about an hour. The uses a lot of samples from Mortal Kombat 2.
Orbitz and Vodka - Feels like the opening to a Limp Bizkit track. The riff was made using (I think bass) on a DL4, me mashing the buttons and making the loop. There’s some 303 in the verse and resampled guitar pitched up. In the bridge it’s an appregiating Moog Moth-32 with a DFAM sequence. I used the Moogs, along with the Ottobit as mentioned, quite a lot on the mixtape. They also helped glue the Mixtape together.
The Moog DFAM (on top) and Mother 32 (below)
Gluck Dance - Gluck’s are creatures from Phillip K Dick’s, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Weird creatures from Palmer Eldritch’s imagination but turned real through the reality warping drug Chew Z. when I was trying to come up with titles, I was reading that book and I just thought it’d be funny to imagine them dancing. This song is composed largely of samples taken from two cassettes. One tape of Gamelan music and the other dancehall.
Mechanical Deathwish - The title track! Very inspired by Dan The Automator productions on the first Dr. Octogon record, ‘Dr. Octagonecologyst’, particularly the track, Blue Flowers. The beat is centered around a sample from Béla Bartók’s ‘Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta’. The samples of dialog are taken from a 50’s radio play series, X-Minus One. It’s a pretty classic sci-fi tale and one that seems particularly prescient today, of our continuing of putting our faith in machines and losing our humanity in the process. The story its self is like a clunky version of 2001: A Space Oddity. I love technology but I wish the incentives that drove the types of tech we focused on were moral; we could all live in such a wonderful place…. Anyways, one other note about the track is that it uses a Korg Triton VST for the bridge synth pad part. The Korg Triton was a major production tool in the late 90s and early 2000s, so many pop hits were penned on it. It has these great 90’s synth sounds that are great for creating those moody X-Files music feels.
Composite Break with KPK - Made this track with my buddy Kevin, easily the hardest working dude in the Philly DIY scene. A stalwart and dedicated facilitator of music here, Kevin used to bring around his PA system all around the city and deliver great sounds to all sorts of bands and artists, which is how we met. We worked on a quite of few Ghösh tracks together, Kevin was a member of the band too for a time. I really love the track we made together, it feels “sophisticated” to me. I am proud of the sound design we made during track and of the counterpoint between the different breaks as well as in the different melodic lines, weaving in and out. It feels like a 90’s Warp Records track.
Trench Bond Gang feat XP Rx - This is a mish-mash of a track. I worked on this track with Will from Primal Rat Screw, an eclectic no-wave metal band from Philly. The song is built on a loop from an early music choral piece, I can’t remember which one. With a footwork/trap style beat thrown underneath. I tried to make it dark and spooky as possible, inspired a lot by the witch house bands from the late 2000s, such as Salem and oOoOO. Will has such a cool low voice, I wanted to lean into that for the production.
You Need a Hero (Dose) - The track is centered around a sample from the group, Pages, a sort of jazz fusion smooth pop group from the 80’s. The song being “You Need A Hero”. I chopped and screwed the beat (again using the Ottobit) I added some pitch shifted guitar and put some dialog from an old PSA about the dangers of LSD. All those videos do though is make you want to do it.
End of the World - Last track. Just a brutal, aggressive, industrial feeling break beat. Lots of use of the Ottobit on this, you can hear all the bit crushing and filtering. The end arpeggio is taken from an old video game soundtrack, sorry can’t remember off the top of my head, found on the Internet Archive and heavily manipulated. There is so much cool shit on there, old video game manuals, soundtracks, even the games themselves. A real bastion of the old internet. It ends the Mixtape on an ambiguous note.
If you made it this far, thanks for taking the time to read all the way. I’ll include a Youtube playlist of tracks that were references or inspiration for the Mixtape. Not sure what the best method for sharing tracks, everyone can use Youtube without the app, most people have spotify, both are shitty options for the artists. I don’t have spotify so for education purposes I guess it’ll be Youtube. Open to suggestions here.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9hddC2bnB2jCKVEO10U3IBy9rTvWeec7&si=2l0wMph1CqQ96Z4s
-Z